T. H. White Quotes

He was neither clever nor sensitive, but he was loyal — stubbornly sometimes, and even annoyingly and stupidly so in later life.

"You run a grave risk, my boy," said the magician, "of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted."

He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.

Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically -- to those who hardly think about us in return.

It is generally the trustful and optimistic people who can afford to retreat. The loveless and faithless ones are compelled by their pessimism to attack.

The Victorians had not been anxious to go away for the weekend. The Edwardians, on the contrary, were nomadic.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.

How condescending, how splendidly democratic of Sir Lancelot, to laugh, as if he were an ordinary man! Perhaps he eats and drinks as well, or even sleeps at night.

How can you have boundaries if you fly? Those ants of yours — and the humans too — would have to stop fighting in the end, if they took to the air.” “I like fighting,” said the Wart. “It is knightly.” “Because you’re a baby.

You must remember I am the King of England. When you are a king you can’t go executing people as the fancy takes you. A king is the head of his people, and he must stand as an example to them, and do as they wish.

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rule. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically – she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have the knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living – not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth – if women ever do hope this – but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one – knowledge of the world.

In the course of a long experience of the human race, I have learned that you can never make them understand anything, unless you rub it in.

he began to see why Merlyn had always clowned on purpose. It had been a means of helping people to learn in a happy way.

"We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians'; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated.”

The snow-haired Uncle Dap, so old as to be absolutely fabulous, was trying to jump over his walking-stick.